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Tuesday, September 27, 2011

National Olfactory Awareness Day

You know how I said yesterday that I wasn’t really sure why I hadn’t written in over ten days? I think I’ve figured it out. All I can think (and write) about these days (weeks) is food and smells and the smells of foods and the tastes of smells and all sorts of other taste-and-olfactory complainy obsessiveness that CANNOT BE INTERESTING to read about.

Do I care that someone on Facebook had cereal for dinner? I do not. Do you care that some blogger had pasta with lemony tomato sauce for lunch? Surely you do not. Bless you for reading anyway because, unfortunately, for now it’s all I’ve got.A dear friend who started out as my boss when I was a writer-in-the-schools and within days revealed herself to be my long-lost sister (in spirit if not in parentage) writes a blog, nosy girl, about her olfactory obsessions—and manages to do it in a way that’s interesting and compelling. Perhaps in small part because she’s not pregnant and she’s a lot more cheerful than me, so it’s not all, “This smells yucky and so does this and this and blaaughhh!”

Like nosy girl, I’ve always had a really sensitive nose, but somehow (perhaps in small part because she has a better personality than I do) she’s channeled her sensitivities into a love of scents and the exploration thereof. I, on the other hand, feel 97% tormented by my sensitive nose and would generally be happy to trade in some of my olfactory superpowers for, say, the ability to fly. I mean, does anyone really die from hard-to-detect gas leaks anymore?

Every week or so nosy girl posts an interview with a friend about their experience moving through the scented world. She interviewed me a month or so ago—before I knew I was pregnant—and posted it today, inadvertently giving me permission to continue to obsess about smell here on the Information Superhighway.

The smell of lighter fluid and diesel fuel and slow-to-light gas stove burners and old garbage has always made me feel a bit queasy. The difference when I’m pregnant—especially at the beginning—is that I’m a bit queasy at baseline, so anything on top of that makes me lose my lunch entirely. Plus there are all-new smells that are suddenly intolerable, as most anyone who’s ever been pregnant knows.

Last time I was pregnant, I was done in by the scent of garbage, my shampoo, most any hand soap, coffee, BBQ grills, and our secondhand bed which turned out to have a slight mildew problem. (An update on that story: the bed frame is finally gone, hallelujah. We now sleep on a box-spring and mattress on the floor because we cannot agree on what a new bed frame should look like. Also, it’s easier for the baby to climb on and off. Also, I’m terrified a new bed frame will smell like glue or veneer or paint or varnish or warehouse or something.) This time around, the list has grown to include (in no particular order):

-The inside of a refrigerator—any refrigerator, including our new one (though not a fraction as bad as the old one)
-The inside of shoes—any shoes that have ever been worn by anybody.
-The caulk used to secure the new (functional!) windows in the (first) baby’s room.
-Our cloth napkins.
-Our dishtowels.
-Our sheets.
-Our pillowcases.
-Our bedroom, generally.
-Green onions.
-Peanut oil.
-Kimchi.
-Cat food.
-Eggs in the process of being cooked. (Pure gaggy sulfur, that one.)
-The inside of the dishwasher.
-The kitchen garbage.
-The kitchen sink.
-The kitchen, generally.
-Our old wool rugs.
-Garbage trucks. (The baby’s new favorite vehicle to spot on the road—just edging out “Schoo’buh!” I’ve taught her to follow up her observation of “Garbage tuck” with “Stinky.”)
-Dirty diapers.
-Wet diapers.
-The toilet.
-The bathroom, generally.
-Three different kinds of dish soap, including one that’s “unscented.”
-Three different kinds of bath gel, including one that’s “unscented.”
-The water from our faucet.
-Ice cubes made with water from our faucet.
-Our back deck, underneath which a rat might have once died.
-The area around our back deck (a.k.a. “The backyard”).
-Diesel fuel.
-Gasoline.
-Washer fluid.
-Car wash soap.
-Michele Bachmann.
-Rick Perry.
-Mitt Romney.

Thank you for listening to me complain, ad nauseam. Next I will tell you what I’m going to eat for a snack! (Hint: three syllables; rhymes with “venereal.”)